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For someone who has newly acquired a camera and is snapping away at everything in sight, photography must seem to be a field that simply involves pointing your camera at something you like and pressing a button. There is, however, a lot more that goes into actually earning you the title of a good photographer and clicking photographs that are both aesthetically pleasing and properly aligned.
Here we have listed out tips for budding photographers that will help you better explore the field of photography.

1: THE CAMERA DOESN’T MATTER:
Many young photographers who have just entered the field believe they need to own the most expensive equipment possible to click the best pictures. This is NOT true. Yes, owning a good quality camera does, of course, add to the kind of picture you capture, but not as much as you’d think. A skilled photographer can find a way to click a good picture even with an inexpensive point and shoot, while a new photographer might not get much out of even the most expensive equipment. More than the camera you own, good photos depend on your understanding of lighting, exposure, angles etc.

2: UNDERSTAND THE EXPOSURE TRIANGLE:
Photography is all about learning to capture and manipulate light and to do this you need to understand the exposure triangle, which includes 3 factors, ISO, Aperture and Shutter speed.

-ISO: ISO controls a camera’s sensitivity to light such that a low ISO setting will mean the camera will be less sensitive to light and vice versa. An ISO setting of 100-200 is ideal when shooting outdoors, while a higher ISO of 400-800 is preferred when shooting in low lit situations.

-Aperture: Aperture is the opening of your lens and controls how much light enters. A wider aperture lets in more light, whereas a narrower aperture restricts the amount of light that enters. Aperture size affects your depth of field which can further affect, for example, the background blur.

-Shutter speed: The shutter speed controls how long your shutter stays open when you take a picture. The longer your shutter remains open, the more light gets through to your camera’s sensor.

3: KEEP YOUR CAMERA WITH YOU AT ALL TIMES:
The biggest requirement that goes into becoming a good photographer is to have your camera with you at all times. Photo ops can come when you least expect it. This will help you experiment with everything around you, even at the most unexpected times. This also ensures that you practise more and like every art, photography also goes by the saying, practice makes perfect.

4: UNDERSTAND THE RULE OF THIRDS:Good composition is at the heart of any great photograph and one of the easiest and best theories as to how to compose a photo is the rule of thirds, which involves mentally dividing a picture into thirds using two horizontal and two vertical lines and then placing elements of greater visual appeal at any of the four intersections.

5: EXPERIMENT WITH THE PERSPECTIVE:
A good way to capture the perfect picture is to experiment with your perspective. Change your quintessential angles; change your elevation and your distances. In short, don’t just go for the age-old method of only capturing the world from a straight on eye level, because this is both boring and overused.

Once you perfect these five main tips, there are many, many more that can contribute towards making you a good photographer. Making use of the golden hours, shooting in RAW and understanding symmetry and aesthetics are just some among the hundreds.

As a photographer, your job is not complete with just the clicking of the picture. Usually, the hard part comes after. The actual photo itself can be thought of as an outline and now you need to colour it in to make the picture complete. This is because any photographer worth his salt would shoot in RAW. RAW is a file format where the pictures have minimal processing on them by the camera. A photographer has a lot of freedom to do what he wants to do in post-processing because all of it will be exactly as he wants it to be. But for post-processing you need software. So the question arises which software is best?

This is a list in no particular order. All these softwares are great in their own regard. Some are better suited to one use-case over another.

DxO Optic Pro 10:

This software initially came out as a tool for correcting the distortion, lens aberrations and edge softness that are present in almost all lenses, using specially developed profiles. But now the functionality has been extended to advanced RAW conversion tools that help you get the best dynamic range, colour information and maximum definition from an image. There is also a range of colour and tone adjustments to choose from, but unfortunately, none of it is localized. The only downside to using Optic Pro 10 is you would still need standalone tools to manipulate and organize the images.

It is available for Mac and PC. Optic Pro 11 costs around $200 (13,207 INR) as a one-time purchase.

Corel PaintShop Pro X8:

PaintShop Pro is the rival to the ever-popular Photoshop by Adobe. It is built with almost all the functionality that Photoshop has though it works a little bit differently. If you are familiar with Photoshop it won’t take you long to adapt to PaintShop Pro. There is also the helpful Learning Centre built in to help understand the software better. The downside of this software is it works a bit slowly compared to Photoshop and there’s also the price to consider.

It is available only on the PC. PaintShop Pro costs around $100 (6,603 INR) a year as a subscription-based service.

Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop and Lightroom):

These two software’s are considered as one because they are currently bought as one under the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan. They complement each other extremely well because both of them are needed to make that perfect edit. Photoshop is a lot more technical with a lot of tools that are presented in a clean and fast interface. But it is limited in the way that it does not provide a library for photos and there are hardly any single click effects that you can apply. This is where Lightroom comes in. Lightroom catalogues your images and helps you apply effects to your picture in a non-permanent way. But Lightroom does not provide tools for layers, masks, selections and retouching that Photoshop is so great for. But if you use both together they are unbeatable in its functionality.

It is available on both PC and Mac. Photoshop and Lightroom are available for $10 (660 INR) per month as a subscription-based service.

GIMP:

Now you might be a photographer starting out and would not want to dish out the cash needed to get this powerful software. You might be looking for something free and has no commitment. This is why GIMP has the title of the best free photo editing software. It has a lot of functionality built in and is highly efficient at what it does but unfortunately, it is quite difficult to use and does not have the same creature comforts like the other software on this list has.